Homage: Le Violoncelle (excerpt) - the YouTube poster relays: We track in and then around what appears to be Man Ray's classic surrealist image featuring his muse Kiki. Beautiful shapes and silhouettes - including an ancient Greek gymnopédiste - dance serenely in the background. For just a moment before metamorphosis, our violoncelle comes to life to sing us a poem set to Satie's haunting Gymnopédie No.1. " Le Violoncelle" is a single-shot micro-voyage into the creative milieux of Man Ray, Erik Satie & Kiki de Montparnasse, and from the beginnings of photographic manipulation to the present era of digital duplicity.

[YOUTUBE]yWrWOlQE5Ps[/YOUTUBE]

__________________“Above all, remember that the most important thing you can take anywhere is not a Gucci bag or French-cut jeans; it's an open mind” Gail Rubin Bereny

Work by Man Ray will be included in a major photo tribute to his lover, Lee Miller, at London's V&A museum later this year.

Never-before-published work by Lee Miller – who was born 100 years ago today - will go on show at London's V&A museum in the autumn.

The exhibition will include studies of Lee Miller by fellow photography legends, Man Ray and Edward Steichen.

'The Art of Lee Miller will bring together the greatest images of and by Lee Miller and will feature works never before exhibited or published, including satirical drawings and some of the most disturbing photographs ever taken,' said the V&A in a statement issued to the UK press today (23 April 2007).

'It will also explore Lee Miller's other talents as model, Surrealist muse and journalist, charting her unconventional and eventful life.'

Miller's images of Charlie Chaplin and Picasso will be displayed alongside her travel, fashion, advertising and documentary work.

These include her photojournalism from the Second World War when she worked as a freelance war correspondent for Vogue magazine.

'Lee Miller's life has been described as a jigsaw puzzle,' said the show's curator Mark Haworth-Booth. 'Now 100 years after her birth this exhibition finally weaves together her many arts and tells the tale of one of the 20th century's most creative women.'

Miller was born in New York. She died in Sussex, England in 1977.

Sponsored by Olympus the show will run at the V&A from 15 September (until 6 January 2008).

An iron is transformed into a new and potentially threatening object, by the addition of a row of nails. The nails and the evocation of desire, violence, and hot metal, suggest a paradox with the work's title, 'Cadeau' the French word for 'Gift'.The idea is not only to make it useless, but also to counter its original purpose by an ambivalence of the senses. With his pioneering, experimental achievements and technical innovations, Man Ray became one of the only American artists who was central to both the Dada and Surrealist movements.

His advancement of Duchamp's revival of the assisted ready made, makes for an exceptional comment on Dadaist ideals, I love this piece for its simplicity and yet somehow through Ray's conception, complexitycredit: heyokmagazine

Thank you for this thread! I love all things surreal. I'm fascinated how placing attention on a typical but often overlooked part of the body, like the hands - a part almost always naked, as important to passion as lips, yet so often ignored or considered mundane - he could arrange such a sensuous piece.